Hi Jan,

I think we all noticed that in 2026 something happened in our profession. We all heard one billion and a half different opinions, and I think we are all either extremely pessimistic, extremely optimistic or extremely uncertain about what is happening. For sure it has been tiring.

Personally, I am in the "extremely uncertain" group. I will not bother you by reconstructing the roller coaster of emotions I went through this year, because I think they are the same things that most of you have experienced as well. I would be very curious to know how you are seeing what is going on in our profession. You can let me know by replying to this email.

Something we have been working on recently at Strumenta is evolving some tools we built over the years to work with legacy codebases. When working on legacy migrations we often find ourselves in front of a codebase we need to discuss with our clients: we need to understand it, we need to analyze it, we need to track decisions about what to migrate, what to change, and so on. Because, otherwise, how could we help?

In the last few months, we evolved these tools significantly. I want to share with you this video in which I show you the tool. In this case it is applied to an RPG and DDS codebase, but we used the same tool for different languages: EGL, COBOL, SAS, PL/SQL, Java, VB6 and more. This is because everything is based on our Starlasu technology, so the same components we built to analyze many languages permit all of them to work with the Codebase Blueprint, and so we can look at all these codebases.

So this is an area we are pushing a lot on, and I would be very curious to know what you think about it and if you see interesting use cases for it.

So far we based it on legacy codebases, but one thing I am thinking about is that, with the capacity to produce more and more software, it becomes difficult to govern it. Sometimes it becomes difficult to keep track of the fact that maybe we evolved some parts of the system, while other parts of the system maybe are not needed anymore, and we did not remove them because we just lost the overall view of the system. I think it could be interesting to evolve also tools to govern applications, not only when dealing with hardcore legacy applications, but in everyday life, to manage the enormous amount of code we work on, at a speed that is just difficult to cope with as a human.

Cheers,
Federico